The field of the present disclosure relates to ad research and, more particularly, to computer-based methods and systems for serving test advertisements to a plurality of panelists and collecting data from the panelists regarding the test advertisements.
Ad servers disseminate advertisements to consumers through personal computer, mobile devices, tablets, and other computing devices. These advertisements may be served through a browser, within applications (“apps”) running on the computing device, etc. The advertisements are used as digital marketing to promote products and/or services to consumers.
The content of ad servers may be constantly updated so that the website or app on which the ads are displayed contains new advertisements—e.g., banners (static images/animations), videos or text—when the site or page is visited or refreshed by a user. The purpose of ad serving is to deliver targeted ads that match the visitor's interests, geography, demographics or other characteristics, or to simply reach a desired number of consumers regardless of their attributes. To generate advertisements that generate awareness, interest, or purchase intent in a product and/or service, ad research is conducted to determine the efficacy of an advertisement.
Ad research may be conducted using pre-testing or in-market evaluation. In pre-testing, advertisers test ads prior to launching an ad campaign in order to estimate which ads are likely to be effective and to receive feedback that can be used to improve the ads. However, this pre-testing is often done in a lab environment in which individuals exposed to ads know they are part of the research. This makes it difficult to replicate the exposure context and mindset of a consumer naturally being exposed to advertisements. In-market evaluation refers to measuring the impact of advertisements during a campaign or after the ad campaign has been completed. However, in at least some known in-market evaluation methods, advertisements are served to individuals about which little, if anything, is known. This makes it difficult to generate research results for a particular demographic (age, gender, occupation, geographic location, etc.) to which the advertisements are targeted. In addition, smaller ad campaigns often do not reach enough people willing to provide data about their advertising effects.